Sharing

by Jon L. Beatty | President and CEO | May 4, 2015

More than half of Flight Safety Foundation’s members are from the business aviation sector, which faces many of the same challenges we see in other segments of the industry. Our upcoming Business Aviation Safety Summit (BASS), scheduled for May 13–14 in Weston, Florida, U.S., will address a number of those challenges.

At BASS 2015, we will have several presentations that discuss data sharing and analysis in the context of business aviation. One will be an update on progress in evolving the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA’s) Aviation Safety Information Analysis and Sharing (ASIAS) program to benefit the general aviation community, and another presentation will look at data collection and sharing in a just culture.

This ties in very well with the Foundation’s newest initiative, the Global Safety Information Project (GSIP). Late last year, the Foundation and the FAA reached an agreement for the Foundation to lead an international project to identify and address current issues surrounding the collection, analysis, protection and use of information gathered through safety data collection and processing systems. GSIP initially will focus on two regions with rapidly growing business aviation communities — Pan America and the Asia Pacific. This project will be a primary focus of the Foundation for the next few years.

I mentioned the Foundation’s membership breakdown because we are counting on help from the business aviation communities in both of those regions to get the most comprehensive look possible at their data collection. We need their input as much as we need it from airlines, air navigation service providers, regulators, manufacturers and other stakeholders.

The next steps of GSIP are to identify stakeholders in these two regions and survey them to understand what sort of data collection, analysis and sharing is going on right now. This is one of the biggest challenges facing aviation safety professionals, and we believe that once this is better understood, it will allow for better sharing and analysis of data across borders.

After the surveys are completed, we will produce an analysis of what is already being done and then help determine what the next steps should be. This survey will be shared widely throughout the industry.

The Foundation is working with the International Civil Aviation Organization’s Regional Aviation Safety Groups (RASGs) in both of these regions. The RASG leadership in these regions is proving to be very helpful in shaping the project and identifying stakeholders.

This project has the potential to help aviation safety professionals better understand how best to move forward with an international effort to collect and share data. The project also has a separate component that will examine the status of data protection efforts and work to strengthen those protections — something that has been on the Foundation’s radar screen for many years.

The best way to make this project as comprehensive as possible is to have full participation from the stakeholders. As this project begins and we reach out with the survey request, we hope everyone will participate.